The artist who turned the CIA's Picasso file into art

Escaldes-Engordany (Andorra)What should be done with the works of art created by a murderer? Should they be canceled, or should they be visible in galleries and museums? The debate is on the table: the new exhibition of the collection Censored, by Tatxo Benet, in the renovated Espai Caldes d'Andorra includes Tom, a photograph by British artist Saul Fletcher, who five years ago killed his partner, art curator Rebeccah Blum, and then himself. At the time, Fletcher was featured in a group exhibition organized by Venice's Palazzo Grassi at Punta della Dogana, a building and site owned by luxury magnate François Pinault. Following the events, the center's officials removed Fletcher's photograph from the exhibition and deleted his biography from the website. "This is not an act of cancellation, but a gesture of condolence," said Palazzo Grassi president Bruno Racine.

In Andorra, Tom is next toIndustrial Maine, a small painting by American Bruce Habowski, was canceled in 2018 from a group exhibition at a university museum in Maine after it was revealed that he had been convicted in 1999 of sexual assault, for which he spent six months in prison. The three works he had on display were removed following complaints from a student and against the discretion of the curator. "These are the two works in the exhibition that are more on the edge than any others, as to whether we can show them or not," says the collection's artistic director, Carles Guerra. However, Guerra, who is the curator of the exhibition, finds that censorship weighs so heavily on all the works on display that he has titled it Censorship is the curator of this exhibition.

The exhibition, which can be visited until September 20, includes works by 18 artists. Beyond the extreme that Fletcher and Habowski may represent, the exhibition includes names such as Marta Minujín, Daniel G. Andújar, Mounir Fatmi, María Evelia Marmolejo, Paul McCarthy, Ai Wei Wei and Núria Güell, who represent how power makes artists pay dearly for their challenges. "The works on display come from different artists and times, but censorship makes you see that certain constants end up emerging," Guerra warns, among them the attack on the female body, as is the case of Marmolejo, who was arrested in Madrid in 1985 after writing the word America at the base of the Plaza Colón monument.

The works are organized by "constellations," and the overwhelming apparatus of the State is also present in Marcelo Expósito's utopian project. 50,000 victims (1991), in which he proposed exhuming the remains of Franco and Primo de Rivera and reburying them a few meters further away without names, like the buried victims of the Civil War. Inside the empty coffins, Expósito proposed stacking "tombstones on which the names of several thousand people still alive would be engraved, taken from telephone lists or other administrative records, in a number approximate to the number of victims then estimated to be buried in the columbariums," the artist himself explained.

The Trial is also present in an exhibition that includes the controversial Spanish flag tied like a rope in a self-managed center in Málaga, and the video that captures Ai Wei Wei's visit to Jordi Cuixart in Lledoners prison, in a more intimate aspect of that of a human rights defender than that of a defender of human rights. They met in the pottery workshop, and Cuixart wanted to deposit the mold of his footprint that Wei Wei had made for him in the collection, as he had done before with other prisoners.

The CIA's Picasso Report

Censorship is the curator of this exhibition This is the first touring exhibition of the collection since the opening of the Museum of Forbidden Art. The origin of the exhibition dates back to the time when the head of museum spaces in Escaldes-Engordany, Aurora Baena, visited the exhibition of the collection Censored at Panera in 2018. And as soon as The Prohibit Art Museum opened its doors in 2023, contacted us to organize an exhibition of works from the collection. "We are very interested in holding this exhibition because the artists are reference points and because we are very interested in this subject," says Aurora Baena, who plans to dedicate the Espai Caldes to contemporary art, as a platform for Andorran artists, and other exhibitions. After Andorra, some of the works could be exhibited at the Museum of Forbidden Art in the renewal of the permanent collection planned for the spring or in exhibition projects in France and Italy that they are working on.

The selection of works includes two of the collection's iconic works: Daniel G. Andújar's macro-installation with copies of the CIA report on Pablo Picasso and the Parthenon made with 100,000 prohibited books by Argentine Marta Minujín from Documenta 7, Documenta 2, and Documenta 1. end up dismantled, because the idea was for the public to take the books home, as can be seen in the video exhibition. Guernica. Communist Picasso (2012), Daniel G. Andújar explained that the CIA interpreted Picasso's membership in the Peace Committee as a communist act, when, in fact, it was an act of generosity by the Malaga-born artist in an institution considered a symbol of peace. Another of the most heartbreaking works in the same vein is Sleep Al-Naim, a 3D video by Mounir Fatmi in which a digital double of Salman Rushdie sleeps peacefully, with a calm that Rushdie lost since he began to be persecuted by the book The Satanic Verses. For nearly thirty years he had done so, but three years ago Hadi Matar stabbed him in New York, and Rushdie lost sight in one eye due to the attack..